Money Lessons From The Ultra Wealthy

Featuring Dr. Laurence Tham

In 2008, Dr. Laurence Tham lost about a quarter of a million dollars.

He'd put money into something he admits was well over his head. When it went, it took his parents' money and his in-laws' money with it — roughly half a million dollars in total, across three households, most of it belonging to people who had trusted him with it.

That's not the mistake he regrets.

What he did next was stop. He put his head down, went back into the practice, and didn't invest again for the better part of a decade. He was good at the practice. The practice worked. And every year he didn't invest felt, at the time, like the responsible choice — the sober correction to a reckless bet.

He calls those the missing years. And he's blunt about which cost him more.

Why the second mistake is the invisible one

A loss announces itself. There's a date, a number, a conversation with your spouse you remember for the rest of your life. It's terrible, and it's finite.

Not investing announces nothing. There is no bad day. There's no moment where you sit down and decide to fall behind. There's just a series of perfectly reasonable years in which you were busy, the practice needed you, the market looked frightening, and the money stayed where it was.

You only find out what it cost much later, and you find out by subtraction — by looking at where you are and doing the arithmetic on where you'd be. Laurence hit that moment at 45. His words: you spend your twenties and thirties telling yourself you've got a long life to earn in, and then one day you're on the other side of the hill, and the runway to earn just got shorter.

That's the part that doesn't get talked about. We tell people to manage risk, and we mean don't blow yourself up. But sitting out is also a risk. It just doesn't feel like one, because nothing is happening.

The cash flow trap

There's a version of this that's specific to your profession, and Laurence named it directly.

A chiropractic practice is a cash flow machine. When it's running well, it produces money reliably, month after month, and it responds to your effort — see more patients, work another day, add an associate, and the number moves. That's genuinely rare, and it's why so many practice owners feel financially fine.

But cash flow is not wealth. It's the thing wealth gets built out of.

Laurence puts it plainly: you are never going to get wealthy from chiropractic cash flow itself. You get wealthy from what you do with it. The practice is the engine. What comes out of the engine has to go somewhere, and where it goes is the entire question.

This is where the trap closes. The practice is responsive and the portfolio isn't. Add a Thursday to your schedule and you see the result inside a month. Put money away and you see nothing for years. So the effort goes where the feedback is, and a decade of good cash flow turns into a decade of good cash flow — and not much else.

The most common version we see isn't even a dramatic one. It's money accumulating in the corporation. Not spent, not lost, not doing anything. It feels like progress because the balance is going up. It's the same missing years, with better bookkeeping.

What the very wealthy actually do about it

Laurence chairs two TIGER 21 groups — peer groups where the entry requirement is twenty million dollars of investable net worth. Every month, one member opens their entire portfolio to the room.

The most useful thing he's learned in there isn't a strategy. It's that these people are far more conservative than he expected, and far more boring. Most of the money sits in a protected allocation that doesn't get touched. A defined slice — a slice, not the whole thing — is carved out for the interesting bets, and even those tend to be in the industry the member already knows cold. The real estate person does more real estate. The operator backs operators.

The other thing he noticed: in ten conversations out of ten, when a member presents their spending to the room, the feedback is that they aren't spending enough.

Sit with that. People who have already won are being told, by their peers, to loosen up. Which suggests the discipline that builds the money and the discipline that lets you enjoy it are not the same muscle, and the first one doesn't switch off on its own.

The part you can act on

There's no clever move in any of this. That's rather the point.

The chiropractors we work with who end up in a genuinely strong position at 55 didn't pick better. They started earlier, they kept going through the years that felt bad, and they had somewhere for the money to go that wasn't the corporate bank account by default.

The ones who don't usually weren't reckless. Most of them were careful. They were careful in exactly the way Laurence was careful between 2008 and 2018 — busy, competent, focused on the practice, and waiting for a better time that never announced itself either.

If you've been burned once and gone quiet since, that's not a character flaw. It's the most human response there is. But the quiet is costing you something, and unlike the loss, nobody is going to send you a statement about it.

The one thing: The loss you can name is rarely the expensive one.

Part 1 of our conversation with Dr. Laurence Tham, on how he built a practice on 94.7% referrals with no marketing, is in the feed. Laurence’s tool for chiropractors, Align OS, is at getalignos.co.

Listen to episode 049 of The Chiro Money Show →

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